Energy Secretary Steven Chu to resign

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is stepping down, ending a four-year tenure marked by milestones in green-energy spending along with withering attacks from Republicans and the collapse of the solar company Solyndra.

Chu announced Friday that he intends to resign once a successor is confirmed, according to a memo sent to Energy Department staff and obtained by POLITICO. He was the last of President Barack Obama’s long-serving Cabinet members to announce plans to leave or stay for the second term.

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“While I will always remain dedicated to the missions of the department, I informed the president of my decision a few days after the election that Jean and I were eager to return to California,” Chu wrote in a lengthy “Dear Colleagues” letter Friday morning. “I would like to return to an academic life of teaching and research but will still work to advance the missions that we have been working on together for the last four years.

“In the short term, I plan to stay on as secretary past the ARPA-E Summit at the end of February. I may stay beyond that time so that I can leave the department in the hands of the new secretary,” he added.

The announcement comes one day shy of a milestone for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist: As of Saturday, Chu will become the nation’s longest-serving Energy secretary, overtaking the record of Spencer Abraham, who held the position for a little more than four years under former President George W. Bush.

Obama has not yet announced a successor, but speculation in Washington has focused on a short list that includes former North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Other people who have gotten recent buzz include Ernest Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served as DOE undersecretary in the Clinton administration.

Some observers of the department said picking someone like Dorgan would make a lot of sense.

“DOE is chronically maligned by politicians — some of which is just gratuitous and some of it is people with longstanding feelings about it — which makes you want to choose someone who’s pretty safe and well-known on the Hill, and certainly Sen. Dorgan would fit that one,” said Sue Tierney, a former Clinton assistant Energy secretary and Obama transition adviser.

Obama’s decision four years ago to tap Chu, a soft-spoken former national lab director, was a break from the tradition of previous Energy secretaries, who typically emerged from politics or industry. Appointing Chu was a signal to the scientific community that Obama was seeking to elevate the position above Washington infighting and set the department on a mission to transform the country’s energy policy, with an emphasis on green technologies such as wind, solar, more energy-efficient buildings and longer-lasting batteries.

Obama took evident pride in having a Nobel laureate in his Cabinet and boasted about Chu’s brilliance. He credited the Energy secretary with finding a way to plug the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and joked once that for “fun on the weekend,” Chu “goes into his garage and he tinkers around and figures out how to extract natural gas.”